Where and How Does One Find the Spirit?

Schmidt Number: S-1954

On-line since: 30th June, 2015

The Riddles in Goethe's Faust — Exoteric

Berlin, 11th March, 1909

It was in August 1831, when Goethe sealed a
parcel, passed it on to his loyal secretary Eckermann and
devised the publication of the sealed treasure. For this parcel
contained Goethe's whole life striving in a comprising sense.
It contained the second part of his
Faust that should be
published only after Goethe's death. Goethe himself was aware
of the fact that he had put in the contents of his rich, widely
ramified life going into the depths of human existence in this
work; and how much this moment was important for himself, this
may arise from the words which he spoke in this time. He said,
now I have finished my life work, actually; what I do
furthermore and whether I do anything generally, this is
irrelevant.

If we open ourselves to such a fact, we
say, a human life cannot be made fertile in a nicer and more
harmonious way for the remaining humanity, namely that is
essential that it is made fertile consciously. It is something
deeply shocking if we pursue Goethe's life of this time—it did
not last longer than one year—and we open
ourselves to that fact that he then visited Ilmenau once again
and read those beautiful verses again which he had written on
the 7th September, 1783, in his youth, so to speak:

Over all mountainsthere is rest;in all treetopsyou perceivebarely a breath;the songbirds are silent in the forest.Just wait, soonyou will rest too.

(Wayfarer's Night Song)

There you may probably say to yourselves, these verses may have
signified a current mood in those days, they aligned themselves
to the general view of Goethe in a new way when he read them
again in tears of emotion in his old age.

Goethe's
Faust
is a testament first-rate in literary and
spiritual respect to humanity. What Goethe completed at that
time in 1831, after he had recently worked since 1824
energetically on this second part of
Faust
was begun since the earliest youth of Goethe. For we realise how
Goethe felt what one could call the Faustian mood since the beginning
of the seventies of the eighteenth century, and how he began then
in 1774 to write down the first parts of his
Faust.
At the important moments of his life, he came back repeatedly
to this poem of his whole existence.

It
appears strange before our eyes: he brings the first parts of
Faust with him to Weimar, when he entered the big world in his
own way. However, they did not yet appear there, but because a
Weimar lady-in-waiting, Miss von Göchhausen, made a
duplicate of that
Faust,
it was preserved and we have the figure of the
Faust
as it was when Goethe arrived at Weimar. The figure is known in which
Faust
appeared in print to the public in 1790 for the first time; then also
the version that was published in the first complete edition of
Goethe's works in 1808.

All
that we have about
Faust,
including that important document which Goethe left behind as his
testament, shows us the different stages of Goethe's development.
For it is infinitely interesting to observe how these four stages
of Goethe's
Faust
face us differently, showing an advancement of Goethe's whole striving.

What Goethe brought to Weimar is a literary work of quite
personal character in which he poured the moods, the levels of
knowledge and of desperation of knowledge as they accompanied
him in his Frankfurt time, in the Strasbourg time and still in
the first Weimar time. It is the work of a human being striving
fervently for knowledge. He had experienced any desperation
that a sincerely and honestly striving human being could
experience, and poured it in this work. All that is included in
the first version of
Faust.
When
Faust
appeared
as a fragment in 1790, Goethe had reshaped it and had worked on
it after he had clarified his whole striving and inner life by
watching the Italian nature and the Italian pieces of art he
had deeply longed for. The personal work of a storm-tossed man
had changed into the work of a man who was serene to a certain
degree who had now a perspective of life before himself, which
stood in a very certain way before his soul.

Then comes the time of his friendship with Schiller (Friedrich
Sch., 1759–1805, German poet), the time when Goethe learnt to
recognise and to experience a world in his inside which was
founded in him already long before, a world about which one can
say that someone experiences it whose spiritual eye has been
opened to behold the spiritual environment. The Faust becomes a
being to him that is put between two worlds: between the world
of the spiritual, which the human being strives for by
purification, and that world which draws down him. Faust
becomes a being between the world of the good and the world of
the bad. While we recognise the single personality struggling
in life in the first version of Faust, now we see a big fight
of the good and the bad powers represented around the human
being who is put in the world struggle as the worthiest object
for which the good and the bad beings fight in the world. While
the human being despairing of knowledge is immediately
represented to us in the beginning of
Faust,
a human being faces us now who is put between heaven and hell, and
with it the poem is raised a level to an elevated existence. It
seems to us, as if in the
Faust
version of 1808, millennia of the human development convene.

There we must think of the greatest dramatic representation of
human life that the ancient time produced, of the Book of Job
— when the bad spirit walks around in humanity and then
approaches God, and God says to him: you have looked around on
earth; have you paid attention to my servant Job?

What sounds to us there, it sounds to us in Faust again. In the
Prologue in Heaven,
God talks with Mephistopheles, with the messenger of the evil
spirituality:

“Do you know Faust?” — “The
doctor?” — “My servant!”

What sounds to us in the book Job: do you know my servant Job?
— Echoes in Goethe and makes the whole Faust riddle
appear in the right light

Then Goethe's rich life continues deepening in the human
existence of which the world has no notion. After he expressed
what he experienced in his soul in this or that work in
manifold ways, he starts once again working on Faust in 1824
looking back at his whole life. He now describes Faust's
passageway through the big world, but in such a way that the
second part completely becomes a portrayal of soul
development.

If
we look at the first part, we must say, a striving soul is
characterised infinitely naturalistically. Everything that
faces us in the first part, in particular in the first
originated parts, is of deep, physical truth, but various
things that sound into it, sound to us still like a kind of
theory, as if anybody speaks about things that he has not yet
completely experienced in his soul.

Now
the second part: there is everything innermost experience of
the own soul. There are the highest spiritual experiences with
which the human being ascends the stages of existence,
penetrates the physical world, and invades where the human soul
becomes merged with universal spirituality and survives with
the world in which it finds space and light at the same time
and what gives it freedom, dignity, and independence. All that
is included like the innermost experience in this second part
of Goethe's
Faust.

The
time will come when one looks at Goethe's
Faust
different from today when one better understands what Goethe
wanted to say when he said to Eckermann on 29 January 1827:
“However, everything is sensuous and is pleasing
everybody if it is presented on stage. I have not wanted more.
If it is only in such a way that the spectators enjoy the
appearance, the higher sense will not escape the initiate at
the same time ...”

If
the first part seems to us in certain respects still
theoretical, not realistic, the second part is one of the most
realistic works of world literature going the deepest into
reality. For everything in the second part of
Faust
is experienced, only not experienced with physical eyes and
physical ears, but with spiritual eyes and spiritual ears. That
is why this second part has been understood so little. One has
seen symbols, allegories in that which is for the spiritual
researcher something much truer and more real than that which
physical eyes see and physical ears hear. Really, from such a
work one can expect a lot. It is the task of the talks of today
and tomorrow to consider some that is contained in this work. I
present the more exterior side of it today; tomorrow I show how
Goethe's
Faust
is a picture of an internal, esoteric approach to life and worldview
in the true sense of the word. We attempt gradually to penetrate
into the inside and to look behind the curtain behind which Goethe
experienced the deepest secrets of his life.

Faustian mood already existed in Goethe when he was a Leipzig
student. We know that he faced up to death by an illness in
Leipzig. At that time, a lot of that which can grasp a human
soul penetrated Goethe's soul. Still various other things had
taken place in him. He had got to know the way how external
science considers life. He did not much care about his
scientific discipline in Leipzig; he looked around in various
other sciences, in particular in natural sciences. Goethe never
lost the firm confidence that one can look just by natural
sciences into the deeper secrets of existence, but he stood
desperately before that which the external science had to say
and to give. This was a jungle of concepts, of dismembered
observation of nature. Nowhere could he find what he had
already searched as a seven-year-old boy when he took a music
stand, put minerals of his father's collection, plants and
other, geologic products on it, took a little aromatic candle
and a burning glass, and waited for the morning. When the first
beams of the morning sun shone into the room, he took the
burning glass and directed the sunbeams on the little aromatic
candle, and kindled it on the altar, which he had offered to
the “great God of nature.” This fire should come
out of the origins and the springs of existence. However, how
far away were these springs of existence from that which Goethe
met in philosophy, natural sciences and in the different
branches of the search for knowledge! How far away were these
“springs of all life” from all such striving!

Goethe came then back to Frankfurt and met thoughtful human
beings with a developed soul-life. These felt their inside
flowing together with the living spirituality of the world.
They were human beings who felt in the full sense in themselves
what Goethe expresses with the words: “The own self
extends to a spiritual universe.” Even then, in Frankfurt
the mood came over him: go beyond the mere striving for
concepts! Go beyond the mere sensuous observation material!
There must be a way to the springs of existence!

He
got to know alchemical, mystic and theosophical literature. He
made practical alchemical experiments. He himself tells how he
got to know a work in which some people searched similar ways
at that time: Welling's (Georg von W., 1655–1727, German
alchemist and theosophist)
Opus mago-cabalisticum et theosophicum
(1719), a work which was regarded at that time
as a way to recognise the springs of existence. He gets to know
Paracelsus, Basil Valentine (Basilius Valentinus, unidentified
German alchemist), and above all a work which had to make a
deep impression on all striving people, the
Aurea catena Homeri
(1723, published anonymously). This was a
representation of nature as the medieval mystics believed to
behold. The mystic, alchemical and theosophical works Goethe
got to know made the impression on him that possibly today any
similarly striving human being gets if he, for my sake, takes
books by Éliphas Lévy (1810–1875, French occultist)
or similarly minded spirits. Yes, at that time these things
made a more confusing impression on Goethe because the
representation of the different writings, which dealt with
magic, theosophy and so on, was such that, indeed, behind the
external symbols secrets were hidden which those who had
written these books no longer understood.

Because one could not pronounce the real ancient wisdom in its
immediate greatness and meaning, it is clothed in an external
unsubstantial garment, clothed in all kinds of physical and
chemical formulae. However, on someone who saw what he can read
in the books externally it made the impression of absolute
nonsense, and at that time there was no way to unravel the
secrets and to penetrate into the sense. However, is not
allowed to misjudge that Goethe was an apprehensive spirit
because of the depth of his quest for knowledge. There it must
appear odd to him opening the
Aurea catena Homeri
and looking at the symbol on the first page deeply touching his
soul: two intertwined triangles, at the corners the planetary
signs, around them two dragons, a flying one above, and one
without wings below, forming a circle. When he read the words
on this page that the volatile dragon symbolises the current
that instils those powers to the dragon below which flow down
from the universe, or how heaven and earth are connected, with
other words, as one reads there: “How the heaven's
spiritual powers pour forth in the centre of earth.”

Such signs and words must deeply work on Goethe. For example,
those that showed the whole development of the world, as one
said “from the chaos up to the universal
quintessence.” It shows a strange transition in oddly
intertwined signs from the chaotic matter, which is not yet
differentiated through the mineral, plant, and animal realms up
to the human being and to those perspectives, to which the
human being advances, to continuous refinement.

However, one did not easily find a way to penetrate into the
deeper sense. At that time, Goethe went away from Frankfurt in
a mood, which one can possibly describe in such a way: I have
found nothing! The naturalists can give me dry, sober concepts,
from which all real water of life is pressed out. Here I have
roved out in various matters that are preserved from times,
which stated to look into the secrets of life. However, the way
is enough to drive one to despair! — This was the mood of
Goethe's soul sometimes. Furthermore, he was not apt, of
course, to get involved with simple speculation and simple
philosophising, with wild symbolising and sensualising in that
which worked so apprehensively on him from these old books.
They appeared to him with their secrets as something to which
he cannot find the way. It was for someone who knows Goethe's
soul at that time already the germ in this soul to penetrate
really into the secrets of existence once, but it should
develop only later. Thus, Goethe felt like pushed away,
unworthy to get into the secrets of existence.

Now
he came to Strasbourg. He met persons there who had to interest
him from the one and from the other side. He got to know
Jung-Stilling (Johann Heinrich J.-S., 1740–1817, German
oculist, author) who had a deeply mystic, “psychic”
disposition, who had put deep looks into the hidden sides of
existence by the development of peculiar forces otherwise
slumbering in the human soul. He also got to know Herder
(Johann Gottfried H., 1744–1803, German theologian,
philosopher) in Strasbourg who had experienced similar moods,
and had often got up to complete negation of life in times of
desperation. Goethe got to know a person in Herder who suffered
from the surfeit of existence, and who roughly said the
following: I have studied many matters, have found various
things about the connection of the human work and the human
striving on earth. — However, he could not say to
himself, never have I had one single moment when my longing for
the springs of life would have been satisfied! — Added to
this, he was ill, and that is why he was inclined to deny
anything with bitter criticism. Nevertheless, Herder called
Goethe's attention to several profundities of the riddles of
existence. Goethe got to know Herder as a really Faustian human
being. Later Goethe got to know that side of the negating man
who does not come out of derision and scorn in his friend Merck
(Johann Heinrich M., 1741–1791, German author and critic). Even
Goethe's mother, about whom we know that she rejected all
moralising and criticising of persons, said about Merck, this
Merck never leaves Mephistopheles at home, one is used to that.
— Goethe got to know Merck as a negator of many things
which are desirable in life.

Compared with all impressions that Goethe received from these
persons in Strasbourg, it was the consideration of nature with
which he realised various riddles of existence. At the same
time, we have to imagine Goethe as a human being with
penetrating, sharp mind, and as a practical one. Goethe became,
as everybody knows, a lawyer. He exercised this activity for a
short time only. Who knows, however, the activity of Goethe as
a lawyer or later as a Weimar minister knows that an eminently
practical sense appertained to him. As a lawyer, he did not
know more than the memorised codes, but he was a human being
who could decide with quick look what he had received. Such a
human being also knows to draw the lines of life with sharp
outlines before himself. Thus, on one side Goethe appears to us
with the talent to have the sharpest concepts about the world,
on the other side to feel the deepest grief of a dissatisfied
thirst for knowledge. He appears to us as somebody who searched
the deepest things and was rejected by them. Something else was
added.

Goethe got to know that mood which one can characterise: he
knew what it means to feel guilty! He felt guilty towards the
simple country girl Friederike Brion (1752–1813) in Sesenheim
(a little village in Alsace/France) in whom he had aroused
various hopes and soul moods, and nevertheless whom he had to
leave then. All that collided in the strangest way in Goethe's
soul. From all these moods, a poetic figure took shape, which
was based on the observation of that figure which could face
him at every turn in those days. The figure of Faust, that
strange personality, lived in the first half of the sixteenth
century. Faust was the object of manifold folk plays and puppet
shows, he attained literary significance by Christopher Marlowe
(1564–1593, English dramatist), and who became a living problem
at that time, actually, for many poets, like for Lessing, for
example, for Goethe. How did it happen that Goethe connected
his own grief and his moods with the figure of Faust?

Faust, one tells, lived in the first half of the sixteenth
century, a time in which many things were decided in history.
If you compare this time to the eleventh and twelfth centuries
when one led a life of knowledge, you find these times very
different. In the twelfth century, it was possible for those
spirits who penetrated into that which time offered them to
reconcile what they could find in their souls with it. If they
looked spiritually at the creative of the world sitting
enthroned in divine heights and if they formed concepts about
that, they could go back to the external natural sciences. The
souls got to know something like a sequence of steps there. At
the bottom, on the lowest step one recognised what one gets to
know as a physicist. On the next step one gets to know the
higher secrets of existence, the concealed side of existence,
which the spiritual eye and the spiritual ear could attain. On
the highest stages, one got to know the stages of the divine
existence in sublime, in fine crystal-transparent concepts
which were, however, lively and efficient on the soul, and
everything was connected with each other.

One
may look down at the spirits of that time with a shrug today;
it is a way, which is nowhere interrupted. If you take, for
example, the way of knowledge of Albertus Magnus (~1200–1280,
German theologian and philosopher) who begins below in the
lowest nature and ends with a view of God, there are not dry
and sober concepts, but concepts which make the soul warm and
shine through the heart.

This did no longer apply to the times in which Faust lived.
There were the concepts also abstract, which were coined by a
theologian about the steps of the divine existence but dry and
sober. These were concepts which one could study in which one
could immerse with reason and mind. However, reason nowhere
found the possibility to connect these concepts to the living
existence surrounding us. It also nowhere found the possibility
to make the soul clear and the heart warm. Then it had happened
that the science which one had as mysticism, magic, theosophy
and which dealt with of the matters that one perceives with
spiritual eyes and spiritual ears, was in a complete decline,
above all, because various things, which were once hidden in
the handwritings, were published by the letterpress. They were
grasped by spirits who did not understand them who saw in them
nothing else than something that they had to copy. One
committed some nuisance and nonsense with them in the
laboratories. One took literally, what should be experienced
spiritually, what were only external formulae in the books,
what had, however, a deep sense. One did all kinds of stuff
with formulae and in retorts, and the result was that at this
time theosophy, magic, occultism approached fraud and
charlatanism alarmingly.

It
is in such a way that the path to the spiritual worlds is
connected with dangers in a certain respect, and that human
beings whose striving is not sincere whose mind and reason are
not purified who do not attain pure concepts free of
sensuousness easily falter, can easily come to this abyss.
Thus, it could happen that those who still knew something or
studied the writings of the mystics with hot endeavours did not
find the way, or also because they could not find it,
approached fraud and charlatanism. However, the other could
also occur that this striving among many misunderstandings in
the people was ill reputed as magic. Therefore, Tritheim von
Sponbeim, Agrippa von Nettesheim and some others, who looked
honestly and fairly for spiritual forces in nature, were
regarded as black magicians and swindlers, as people who had
deviated from the good way that the old religion had
predetermined for them.

Faust lived in this period, in the sixteenth century, in a time
that saw the afterglow of an old spiritual current, which was,
however, also the aurora of a quite new time at the same time,
a time that produced such stars like Giordano Bruno, Galilei,
Copernicus, and others. One calls various times “times of
transition.” Of all times, however, none deserves this
name as much as the time of Faust.

From all that we know the Faust figure was such who deeply felt
the inadequate of the study about the spiritual world at that
time. He had studied theology, turned away from it, and looked
for the springs of existence in the last remainders of medieval
magic and similar. Because the figure of Faust is understood
best of all oscillating between the honest striving for
knowledge and the borders of charlatanism, it is also better if
we let him in this light and do not even try to grasp him with
sharp contours. For he was also not grasped by the spiritual
current as he was real; but now all striving which existed in
the folk was comprehended like the external dress of this Faust
figure of the sixteenth century. Thus, he approaches us in
fabulous figure or in the drama as a human being who had
seceded from the old traditions of religion, of theology who
had dedicated himself to a striving — as one believed
from a view becoming more and more narrow-minded — which
could never lead to anything good in life. The whole worldview
of the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries expresses itself
in the words that one could read about Faust in the book of
folk tales. “He laid the Holy Scripture behind the door
and under the bank — and wanted then no longer to be
called a theologian, but became a man of the world and was
called a doctor medicinae.”

One
put into such words, what one thought and felt about Faust. One
felt that he searched the spring, which led to the depths of
life and its origins, and that he wanted to free himself in his
way from the old traditions. In addition, what had survived of
this figure in the folk plays and puppet shows was not
appropriate to give more than the external figure of Faust. But
on Goethe all that worked, which had remained as Faust
tradition in such a way that he could confide to this figure
what lived in himself as life striving and thirst for
knowledge. Thus, we see how he begins during the seventies of
the eighteenth century to concretise himself in the Faust
figure. He deposited all unsatisfactory, all grief arising from
an unsatisfying thirst for knowledge in this Faust figure. If
we look at the first monologue of Faust, we see in the truest
sense of the word what we have characterised at the beginning
of this consideration. We see the man who has looked around in
the external science in many respects who despairs, and who is
on the brink to perishing completely in life, to bursting in
the thirst for knowledge. We see him seizing the old books.
Goethe calls it the book of Nostradamus (Michel de Nostredame,
1503–1566, French physician and seer), but someone who is
competent in the literature of magic, which Goethe also knew at
that time, easily recognises what Goethe meant with the book,
in which Faust sees the sign of the macrocosm. He lets him say
about it:

Lo! heavenly forces rise, descend,
pass golden urns from hand to hand,
crowd from on high through all the earth
on pinions redolent of blessings
and fill the universe with harmony!

What attaches itself like a portrayal of feelings to these
words so that it penetrates him like with delight at the sight
of this page, we recognise in it what worked on Goethe at that
time. Such moods and images could flow into Goethe's soul. He
could write them down with such truth when he stood before that
strange sign. It showed two intertwined triangles, and of two
dragons, the upper spiritual one and the lower physical one
where on the corners of the triangles the planetary signs are
whose forces penetrate each other, so that one really sees the
golden-shining planets like golden buckets (translated as
“urns”). Between them, the forces flow which
harmoniously sound through the universe.

Considering such a thing, you have Goethe's soul before
yourselves with all its deep and honest thirst for knowledge,
and then you almost doubt whether you should bring all that in
sharp concepts and speculate on them. One would like to put
such a fact only before the soul, so that a soul, which has a
feeling of such things, may have infinitely more of it.
However, someone who knows life how it develops through the
ages knows that — considering such deep mental strives
— one is entitled to say, indeed, Goethe was one of those
with whom the seeds are laid in the soul at first, which mature
and yield fruit much later. We see as it were the seeds of that
which sprouted in the later
Faust
so marvellously. Some
people, who have a certain drive for spiritual science, may
also take various teachings for life from it.

Today, unfortunately, one considers such striving too
cursorily. Today one sees people approaching swiftly, and then
they are soon ready with it if they have a few concepts in the
soul. Someone only knows which riddles are there who can look
back at the time twenty, thirty years ago when a fluid flowed
into his soul. There many things have settled on it and many a
thing approached him. Years and experiences have followed; and
thirty years later is that which flowed into his soul mature to
receive an answer to it if only roughly. We cannot look deeply
enough just from this point of view at Goethe's life, and we
feel the mood Goethe himself could feel from the
Aurea catena Homeri,
the
Golden Chain of Homer
(see this poem by Robert Thibodeau:
The Seven Planetary Conditions in the Waking Day, Homer's Golden Chain or Golden Thread Sutra);
we see
it expressed if he erupts in the words of Faust: “How
grand a show!” Indeed, it is a tremendous show, if the
soul immerses in these pictures without having any notion of
what they are. It is a show. However, does it keep to this
notion?

Then the words inevitably come: “But, still, alas! mere
show!” Goethe did not yet understand these deep words at
that time; but at that time that already lived as feeling in
his soul: “All that is transitory is only a
symbol!” As in pain, he might say to himself if he had
the strange figures before himself: even if one draws so
artificial figures, nevertheless, they are external
symbols!

How grand a show! But, still, alas! mere show.

Infinite nature, when can I lay hold on you

and of your breasts?

Any
phrase is deeply felt: a show is only what depicts the
macrocosm. However, he had looked around in various riddles of
natural sciences, and he had got to know what gives that deep
experience to the human being where he must say to himself:
“You have become guilty!” He had experienced this.
There he could hope to be able to feel more if he examined the
other signs that join more the immediate human life. In
addition, this mood expresses itself in Faust. He turns the
page. The sign of the macrocosm replaced by that of the
microcosm, the pentagram and what is around it, and before
Goethe's soul the magic word emerges by which certain
slumbering forces can be properly aroused. Indeed, Goethe got
an idea that there is such a thing as it has been characterised
here. Goethe knew that the human being could arouse slumbering
forces in himself by watching certain symbols and images, so
that he can behold in the spiritual world.

He
could believe that he is affected by that which is close to the
human soul, what expresses itself in the sign of the microcosm.
He lets his Faust pronounce the word, by which certain inner
experiences appear if the human being dedicates himself to it
in deep, inner meditation. He lets him pronounce it, and the
“Earth Spirit” appears, the spirit that animates
the earth and causes that on earth from the general life stream
and world stream the human being can originate and grow. Goethe
understood it wonderfully to press together everything briefly
in words what the secrets of the Earth Spirit are. This Earth
Spirit behaves possibly to the whole earth like the single
human soul, the human spirit to the physical body of the human
being. He is, so to speak, the regent of all natural human
development and all historical becoming. He has no visible
figure, but he approaches someone who opens his spiritual eyes
and can behold, so that he knows, there is such an Earth
Spirit. Goethe characterises that wonderfully:

In
the tides of life, in action's storm,

I
surge and ebb,

move to and fro!

As
cradle and grave,

as
unending sea,

as
constant change,

as
life's incandescence,

I
work at the whirring loom of time

and fashion the living garment of God.

One
could penetrate into any word of this formula and would realise
that someone experiences really, what Goethe characterises
developing his soul up to the corresponding stages of
existence. However, it happens, what all of you know: Faust
does not feel and cannot feel equal to that which appears
there. He does not know the way to the mysterious depths of
existence. To him is that which lives and acts “in the
tides of life, in the action's storm” “a fearful
apparition.” He cannot endure it. He turns away and must
hear the words:

Your peer is the spirit you comprehend

mine you are not!

He
believed from the old traditions, he were “the image of
God,” and now he must say to himself, not equal even to
the Earth Spirit! “You resemble the spirit you
comprehend.” If only people could feel this sentence!
That Goethe felt it, this shows the whole situation in the
first part of
Faust.
The human being can recognise
nothing else than this to which he has developed himself.
“Like someone is, his God is,” Goethe said this
another time. It is like a self-confession of Goethe that he
has not yet found the way to the sources of existence, a
confession which he links here at this point of
Faust.
If we consider this first version of
Faust,
we realise
how Goethe himself has difficulties to show the connection of
his world with the spiritual world for which he strive. Without
real transition the meeting of Mephistopheles with the pupil
takes place in the first
Faust
immediately afterwards. Who is Mephistopheles?

Who
knows the way to the spiritual worlds knows that there this
Mephistopheles is real as one of both tempters whom the human
being meets walking the way to the spirit-land, searching the
way to the spiritual world.

There are two powers, which the human being meets. One power is
that which we call the luciferic power which seizes the human
being more internally, in the centre of his soul, and draws
down his passions, desires, impulses and so on a degree into
the personal, into the ignoble. Everything that works on the
human being that seizes the human being in his core is
luciferic. Because the human being was once grasped in his
development by this luciferic principle, he was at the mercy of
another power. If the human being had never been grasped by
this luciferic principle, the outside world would never face
him in an only material form; then the outside world would face
the human being in such a way that he could say to himself from
the start that all appearance is the expression, the
physiognomy of the spirit. The human being would see the spirit
behind all materially sensuous. Because all material was
condensed by the influence of the luciferic power, that
interfered with the external view which leads the human being
to believe in the phantasmagoria of something external
material. The outside shows that to the human being in the form
of Maya or illusion, as if it is not the external physiognomic
expression of the spirit.

Zarathustra was the first to recognise this power completely,
which shows the outer world in a false figure to the human
being. Under the name “Ahriman,” Zarathustra showed
that figure first which opposes the god of light. Zarathustra
calls this adversary of the god of light Ahriman, and then to
all who linked to the culture of Zarathustra Ahriman became
that deceptive being which intersperses everything with smoke
and fog so that it becomes illusion which the human being would
see, otherwise, in transparent spiritual clarity. If one wanted
to express it especially brusquely, one called this figure,
which spoilt the human being Mephistopheles. For he forced him
in the chains of matter and lied to him about the true figure
of the material. This figure was called Mephistopheles in
Hebrew, “mephiz” meaning spoiler, and
“topel” liar. This figure went over to the West,
was transformed to the medieval figure of Mephistopheles. There
we see in the Faust books Faust opposed to this power; one
calls it also the “old serpent.”

Goethe got to know this Mephistopheles. Then the later Faust
tradition could no longer distinguish the figures of Lucifer
and Mephistopheles substantially. One had no clear idea of
these figures in the times, which followed the sixteenth
century. One did no longer know how Lucifer and Ahriman differ,
all that flowed together into the figure of the Devil or the
Satan. Thus, both flowed together without distinction, and
because one generally knew nothing about the spiritual world,
one did not differentiate in particular. However, Goethe faced
everything as Mephistopheles that the outer senses and the
human intellect give as view of the outer world. The human
being who appeals only to this ability of the usual mind was to
him, as it were, like another ego of the human being striving
for the spiritual world.

As
to Goethe, everything that appealed — as with Merck and
Herder — to the mere intellect, marvellously represented
in the figure of Mephistopheles, who does not believe in a
world of the good or does not regard it as important. In Goethe
himself this second ego existed, which could come up to the
doubt about the spiritual world, and Goethe sometimes felt
being put in the conflict with the Mephistophelian power. He
felt put between this bad power, which burrowed in his soul,
and the honest striving of his soul for the spiritual heights.
Goethe felt these two powers in his soul. Goethe did not yet
know how to position himself to the spiritual world. He was
still far away from the experience that faces us then with him
in such a magnificent way in the second part of
Faust.

Mephistopheles, the representative of the intellect bound to
the outer material science, confronts the inner human being
striving for the spiritual heights in the second part of
Faust,
in the scene
A Dark Gallery
(The Mothers).
He stands there with the keys. Indeed, this
science is good; it leads up to the gate of the spiritual
world. However, Mephistopheles is not able to enter it, and he
declares that, in which Faust has to go, as
“nothingness.” We hear sounding from that which
Mephistopheles speaks there, in classically magnificent way,
what the materialistic mind of the human being objects also
today to someone who strives to investigate the primal grounds
of existence spiritual-scientifically. There one says to him,
you are a daydreamer! We do not embark on what you, dreamer,
tell us about the spiritual primal grounds of the things. This
is nothing for us! — The spiritual scientist may answer
quite correctly as Faust answers to Mephistopheles: “In
your Nothingness I hope to find my All!”

However, Goethe is far away from such clarity of his soul when
he produced the first version of
Faust
energetically in
his young years. There he does not yet know how he should make
Mephistopheles approach Faust. Mephistopheles is there as
Goethe had experienced him as a pulling down power where he
appears sneering in the scene with the student. Only later,
Goethe found the mediation where Mephistopheles gradually
approaches Faust in the changing figures.

Then we see where Faust is pulled down by Mephistopheles in the
scene
Auerbach's Wine-Cellar
where he hurls
himself into the strudel of sensuousness, where he begins to
become guilty. In the fragment of 1790, the end, the
Prison
scene, was not yet contained. Goethe had
restrained it. Nevertheless, it was already in the first
fragment, this stupefying
Prison
scene. Goethe put that
side of his life in this Gretchen tragedy, which expresses
itself in the words, I have become guilty! — What
expresses Goethe in the first part of
Faust
is the word “personality.”

Only that Goethe, who travelled to Italy, can unfold a part of
the seeds, which are sown in his soul there. He finds a strange
way on his Italian journey. One can pursue it gradually. He
writes to his Weimar friends, “It is certain that the old
artists have as big a knowledge of nature and such a concept of
that which can be imagined and how it must be imagined as Homer
had. Unfortunately, the number of prime pieces of art is too
small. However, if one sees them, one has nothing else to wish
than to recognise them correctly and then to part in peace. At
the same time, these high pieces of art were produced as the
highest physical works by human beings according to true and
natural principles. All arbitrary, imaginary disappears: there
is necessity, there is God.” ... “I suppose that
they proceeded (the creators of these pieces of art) according
to the same principles after which nature itself proceeds and
which I trace.” — There he shows that he is not
only that Goethe, who is fulfilled with an abstract longing,
but also that he is ready to investigate the existence
devotedly step by step, that he is on the self-sacrificing way
where the riddles of life reveal themselves to him.

One
is not surprised if people do not achieve anything concerning
the big spiritual goal of humanity that they want to accomplish
only from an abstract striving. They directly approach the
biggest issues of life; they are not inclined to compare the
single plants, the single animals, to compare bone to bone;
they do not go through the world gradually composedly to find
the spirit in the details: with them, the abstract longing
leads to nothing. Look at Goethe how he gets around to finding
the archetypal plant gradually on the Italian journey. He
collects stones, he prepares himself for it, and he does not
directly look at that which “interweaves in one.”
He says to himself, if you want to get an idea how “one
works and lives in the other how heavenly forces rise and
descend and pass the golden urns from hand to hand,” then
observe how the vertebrae of the spinal cord are strung
together, how the forces co-operate. Search in the smallest the
picture of the biggest! — Goethe already became an
industrious student by the Italian journey who observed
everything in detail who searched the biggest in the smallest
and said to himself, if the artist proceeds in the sense of the
Greeks, namely “according to the principles after which
nature itself proceeds,” then the divine that is found in
nature is contained in his works.

Goethe considers art as “a manifestation of secret
physical laws.” What the artist creates is physical work
on a higher level of perfection. Art is a continuation and
human end of nature. For “while the human being is put on
the summit of nature, he regards himself as a whole nature
which has to produce a summit in itself once again. To this end
he improves himself, while he penetrates himself with all
perfection and virtues, invokes choice, order, harmony and
meaning and rises, finally, up to the production of the piece
of art.”

One
can say that all that faced Goethe in sharp contours, in serene
inner soul experiences during the
Italian Journey
(1786–1788, published as book 1816–1817). Then there
he took up his
Faust
again, and there we see how he tries to
connect the isolated parts. However, we also see how he delved
objectively into that which Faust could become within the
Nordic nature. He realised in particular in Italy how different
a figure is which has grown up in sites of classical education.
There he says, it is strange that one does not hear so many
ghost stories in Rome as they appear in the north. Moreover, we
see him writing the
Witch's Kitchen
in the Villa Borghese, like someone who has already gone adrift from
the whole, but as one who remembers the Earth Spirit again.

At
that time, when he had written about the Earth Spirit first, he
could show him only in such a way that Faust turns away like a
“worm that writhes away in fright.” Nevertheless,
also such a fact that one turns away, even if one cannot yet
understand it, remains in the soul, it works. In Goethe, it
continued working. Only those people who are impatient and
cannot wait, until the seeds sprout after decades, do not find
the way. When Goethe is in Italy now, he knows that also such a
“writhing away in fright” has its effect on the
soul. Now those words originate:

Spirit sublime, all that for which I prayed

all that you now have granted me. In fire

you showed your face to me, but not in vain.

You gave me for my realm all nature's splendour,

with power to feel and to enjoy it. You grant

not only awed, aloof acquaintanceship,

you let me look deep down into her heart

as
if it were the bosom of a friend.

You lead the ranks of living beings past me,

and teach me thus to know my fellow creatures

in
air and water and in silent wood.

And when the storm-swept forest creaks and groans,

when, as it falls, the giant fir strips down

and crushes neighbouring boughs and trunks, and when

the hill echoes its fall as muffled thunder,

you guide me to the safety of a cave,

reveal my self to me, and then my heart's

profound and secret wonders are unveiled.

Goethe realises the possibility of the human soul to extend to
a spiritual universe by its own development. By a devoted,
composedly resigned searching Goethe faces the fruits that
germinated at that time when he met the Earth Spirit. The
monologue in
Forest and Cave
shows what a great leap
forward that was; he shows us that the seeds, which were sown
in him at that time, were not sown in vain. Like a reminder of
patience, of waiting, until such seeds mature in the soul, the
fragment of
Faust
faces us, which appeared in 1790 with
these passages. Now we see how Goethe finds the way bit by bit,
after he has been led to “the safety of the cave”
where deep wonders of his heart have been revealed. There he
gains the overview to adhere not only to own grief; there he
obtains the possibility to stay aloof from own pains, to send
the guessing look into the macrocosm, to look at the fights of
the good and bad spirits and to see the human being on their
battlefields. In the
Faust
of 1808, he sends ahead the
Prologue in Heaven:

In
ancient rivalry with fellow spheres
the sun still sings its glorious song,
and it completes with thread of thunder
the journey it has been assigned.

Then we see the macrocosmic powers combating each other. We see
from experiences of Goethe's soul a strange light shining on
both dragons that Goethe faced in his youth.

Therefore, this
Faust
is such a world poem because it
contains so many reminders, because it says to us — it is
a golden word: wait in confidence in the development of your
inner forces, even if it means to wait for a long time! —
Like such a reminder also the words sound that are inserted as
Dedication
before
Faust,
where Goethe looks back
to those “elusive shapes hovering close my eyes but dimly
glimpsed when I was young,” which are penetrated now by
clearness. Now, after he had to wait so long, those friends
have already died who have taken an active interest in it when
he met them with the first
Faust,
and he had to say
about the others who had not died that they are far far away.
Goethe had to wait in the development of the seeds, which were
in him at that time, so that now the affecting words sound to
us:

My
tragic song will now be heard by strangers

whose very praise must cause my heart misgivings,

and those to whom my song gave pleasure,

if
still they live, roam scattered everywhere.

It
is no longer for those who felt with him when they were young.
He had to wait as the two last lines of this
i>Dedication
express it so nicely, what was real to me once, it disappeared
to unreality. However, what has remained to me and what
appeared to the external view as unreality is truth to me, now
I can pour it only in the forms in which it appears as truth.

Thus, we see how just this poem, even if one looks at it only
externally, as we did it today, leads into the depths of the
human soul.
Faust
was begun in this kind of
continuations that always pushed parts between the others only.
Goethe could not show there what he had experienced in his soul
in the meantime. The fact that Goethe also expressed his
deepest soul experiences in
Faust,
brought about something else.

The
Helena
scene belongs to the first parts of
Faust.
However, we see it not included in the
Faust
of 1808. Why not? Because it could not be included in such a way
as Goethe had
Faust
ready at that time. What Goethe wanted
to show with Helena was the expression of such a deep notion of
the deepest riddles of existence that the complete first part
was not sufficient to incorporate it. Only in his old age,
Goethe was able now to shape what his real inner lifework
was.

Thus, we see how his view has opened itself up to the
macrocosmic worlds as he expresses it in the
Prologue in Heaven.'However, we still want to see how Goethe knows to
show the way, the steps of the soul experiences, which lead the
human beings from the first steps up to imaginative view where
the soul penetrating deeper and deeper busts the gates of the
spiritual world, which Mephistopheles wants to close. Goethe
also shows these inner experiences. Because he shows what the
soul can experience in the spiritual, spiritual-scientific
schooling realistically in the second part of
Faust,
we see the deepest riddles of existence. That faces us almost if
it is recognised as a Western announcement of spiritual science
in brilliant style. One is tempted to put such a poem as, for
example, the
Bhagavad Gita
beside the second part of
Faust.
Great, tremendous profundities speak from such Eastern writings.
It is, as if the gods wanted to speak to the human beings and
express that wisdom, from which they created the world. Indeed,
that is true. We now look at the second part of
Faust;
we see it brought to the human beings. We see
the striving human soul, which rises from the external sensuous
view to the height of spiritual beholding working up to the
true clairvoyance, where Faust enters the spiritual world and
the spiritual choir surrounds him:

In
these sounds we spirits hear

the new day already born.

Cavern portals grate and rattle,

rolling wheels of Phoebus clatter,

light arrives with deafening din!

Brasses blare, the trumpets peal,

eyes are blinking, ears astounded -

things unheard you must not hear ...

Up
to the passage where Faust loses his eyesight, so that the
outer world disappears to his perception, and he must say to
himself, “but in my inner being there is radiant
light,” up to that passage where the soul works up to the
spheres of the world existence, where the world riddles reveal
themselves to the soul. This is a way, which we have to call an
esoteric one.

Tomorrow, we shall see how one penetrates from the outer into
the inner life of the Goethean world riddles. Tomorrow, we
shall see from which depths Goethe spoke the words, which gave
him the certainty of all longings, of all sufferings and pains
of his life, striving, and quest for knowledge:

For him whose striving never ceases,

we
can provide redemption;

and if a higher love as well

has shown an interest in him,

the hosts of heaven come

and greet him with a cordial welcome.

(Verses 11,936–11,941)

The
talk of tomorrow shows us how Goethe solves these riddles of
existence and shows how that which lives in the soul can ascend
to its true homeland. It will deal with Goethe's riddles of
existence, about which he gives us so hopeful answer at the end
of the second part of
Faust:

This worthy member of the spirit world
is rescued from the devil:
for him whose striving never ceases
we can provide redemption.

With it, he says to us, Faust can be saved! The spirits that
want to lead the human beings to the mere material and to
destruction are not allowed to be victorious.